Evidence for God from Science

KBCid wrote:Chemical 'evolution' is how the foundation is asserted to occur and 'evolution' is how the house gets built. Do we see any similarity here? Chemical evolution (foundation building) as Bada pointed out requires that replication has to occur and that ...mutations are passed down to offspring...;
...So yea these are absolutely different concepts that no one in their right mind could ever see any similarities between.
It's evolution all the way down to base chemicals.

sandy_mcd wrote:Fine, I'll stipulate again that there is a continuum between abiogenesis and evolution of species. But the processes are so different that they require different techniques and expertise to study.

Let's break this down, you say there is a "continuum between abiogenesis and evolution of species". I will begin with continuum;

continuum
1. A continuous extent, succession, or whole, no part of which can be distinguished from neighboring parts except by arbitrary division.

So it requires an arbitrary division to separate abiogenesis and evolution of species... I would like to make that division begin at my great grandfather since it is arbitrary.

Abiogenesis
Abiogenesis or biopoiesis is the study of how biological life could arise from inorganic matter through natural processes.
...The biologist John Desmond Bernal coined the term biopoiesis for this process,[40] and suggested that there were a number of clearly defined "stages" that could be recognised in explaining the origin of life.
Stage 1: The origin of biological monomers
Stage 2: The origin of biological polymers
Stage 3: The EVOLUTION from molecules to cell
Bernal suggested that EVOLUTION may have commenced early, some time between Stage 1 and 2...

Self-organization and replication
...Martin and Russel show that physical compartmentation by cell membranes from the environment and self-organization of self-contained redox reactions are the most conserved attributes of living things, and they argue therefore that inorganic matter with such attributes would be life's most likely last common ancestor...
...Researcher Martin Hanczyc supports the idea of a gradient between life and non-life (i.e. there is no simple line between the two)...

RNA world
... Darwinian selection would favour the proliferation of such self-catalysing structures, to which further functionalities could be added...
...in his 2004 book The Ancestor's Tale. In his book, Dawkins cites experiments performed by Julius Rebek and his colleagues at the Scripps Research Institute...
...This experiment demonstrated the possibility that autocatalysts could exhibit competition within a population of entities with heredity, which could be interpreted as a rudimentary form of natural selection.

Lipid world
...The main idea in this theory is that the molecular composition of the lipid bodies is the preliminary way for information storage, and EVOLUTION led to the appearance of polymer entities such as RNA or DNA that may store information favorably...
...Such site/compound pairs are transmissible to the daughter vesicles leading to the emergence of distinct lineages of vesicles which would have allowed Darwinian natural selection...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

Yup there is definitely no one referencing evolution or Darwinian natural selection or heredity anywhere in these references.

sandy_mcd wrote:Just as humans artificially separate chemistry and biology as different disciplines, they separate abiogenesis and (biologic) evolution. Some biologist studying the breeding habits of the ruby-throated flea-flicker doesn't need to know the ins-and-outs of the chemical element 49 even though we are all made of atoms. So even though there is a continuum from chemistry to biology, we separate them for convenience. Even within the disciplines of chemistry and biology there are many subfields of specialisation.

The key words here are "artificially separate". The problem sandy is that throughout the explanations of abiogenesis by scientist they consistently infer the same mechanisms as specie evolution. They are treating nonlife with the same mechanisms as life. WE... the people who participated in the beginning of this thread were making fun of this. You can make a thousand arbitrary separations in the imaginary concept of molecules to man but you can't eliminate the necessity for a mechanism to explain it all and so far the darwinian rationale in one form or another is posited all the way down. Its turtles all the way down.

sandy_mcd wrote:But this is getting frustrating. So that i don't have to keep inferring whatever is being implied, what's the point? That no one can study biologic evolution until we know every single last detail of abiogenesis? If that were the case, science would not exist. How could a chemist study molecules without knowing everything about atoms? Etc.

Frustrating is right. It is quite frustrating to have to invalidate every imaginary concept of scientists who cannot provide a rational test for their concepts. It is also frustrating to see them keep trying to squeeze darwinian blah blah at nearly every turn in the subject of abiogenesis when supposedly there was a line of demarcation between self replicating life and random chemicals. Chemicals by the way that they can only hypothesisize to have existed because by scientific observation there was never any such soup to even begin a hypothesis for a natural formation of life. They are making it up as they go and they are trying their best to use principles of the evolutionary theory to make it seem realistic.

KBCid wrote: I will begin with continuum; ... 1. A continuous extent, succession, or whole, no part of which can be distinguished from neighboring parts except by arbitrary division. ... So it requires an arbitrary division to separate abiogenesis and evolution of species... I would like to make that division begin at my great grandfather since it is arbitrary.

Thanks for this post. I have finally accepted how truly hopeless this discussion is.

A final note: The concept of continuum is that "no part of which can be distinguished from neighboring parts except by arbitrary division." There is a continuum from child to adult - there is no clear natural demarcation (only legal). But not many would pick age 5 or 78.

sandy_mcd wrote:A final note: The concept of continuum is that "no part of which can be distinguished from neighboring parts except by arbitrary division." There is a continuum from child to adult - there is no clear natural demarcation (only legal). But not many would pick age 5 or 78.

Not many scientists are picking a specific point in the process where there is a demarcation. This was a major point. They keep asserting the same principles of evolution occuring at nearly every conceivable stage in chemical evolutlion. Where exactly is the arbitrary line being drawn? Remember the entire concept is imaginary, anyone at anytime can hypothesise where a line should be drawn and it holds no greater effective truth than drawing it somewhere else.
Me and you could probably rationalise between us where a line may exist but it has to be based on someones rationale of what they perceive to be a demarcation point and then the other has to agree with that rationale. I would be willing to agree that the line is drawn where priciples of evolution cease to be considered part of the proposed process from base chemicals to self replicating entities. Unfortunately this leaves most of chemical evolution theory well within the realm of standard evolutionary theoretical principles.